Lisa Zahiya Workshops

OMG Lisa Zahiya is amazing. She's beautiful, passionate, and incredibly skilled. I learned so much, my brain hurts. Here's hoping I can remember it all for future use.

Belly Funk

Lisa described this as her personal bellydance style. It's a fusion of popping, locking, old school hip hop, bhangra, and whatever else catches her fancy. We worked on how to pop and lock our bellydance moves, decomposing fluid motion into stutter-stop points. Her decomposition of basic 3- and 4-point motions into 6 stop points simply blew my mind. She also taught and drilled us on waving through our arms, and a little bit on tutting as well.

Drum Solo

We drilled shimmies so much. Lisa went around the room banging on people's knees to see whether we had good strength and balance in both legs. There was also a really fun combination, which had a lot of interesting Lisa-touches like the Michael Jackson hop-skip.

Bollywood

This session focused a lot on precise hand movements. We went through several mudra, including the flag, the lotus, and the thing that always reminds me of a peacock. Then she taught us two short combinations, which were surprisingly difficult for all their apparent simplicity.

Hip Hop Fusion

By the time we got to this workshop, my feet were killing me. We did two short combinations, to different pieces of music, and she asked us how they felt. It really underscored the different attitudes that hip hop can carry, everything from happy-bouncy to grungy-angry. At the end, we put the two combos together and did the whole thing through a couple of times.